asteroids attacking - the blender particle system

widescreen lensflares - 2 halos combined with blend textures

Particles, smoke and explosions

Blender's particle system is quite tricky, it's very powerful and you get really fast renderings, but one has to know how to play with it.
For mindfields i didn't want to make them look flat and 2D as they are looking usually. Blender particles can't be volumetric like in LightWave of AfterBurn [a 3DsMax plugin], they work more like 2D sprites. It took quite some time until i archieved a believable "volumetric" look. i've played a lot with cloud procedual textures and the colorband. 
Here is the material and texture setting for a normal asteroid smoketrail.

Rendering, AllNighters and hot PC

As I have mentioned, render times were very improtant to me. I wouldn't have made this movie with render a week per shot. This was another point where Blender came in handy, it renders soooo damn fast. However, for some particular shots, for example the grass scenes or shots with a very high poly rate [collumns], rendering times went up to 30 hours per shot [Those shots also had a high frame count]. Usually i was rendering in 600x270 widescreen resolution with 5 OSA motionblur. Render time per frame was normally at 2 minutes for complex scenes. In the final days before the publication, I left my computer on all night for rendering and worked on the scenes at daytime. 

Well, that's it for the making of. This was my very first Making Of I ever wrote. I hope you have found any answers and help for your next  blender created short movie adventure!

.andy